What is this "too geeky" you speak of?

Bringing some :) to your afternoon.

2010-03-17T17:05:45Z

The latest updates from Barack Obama's Facebook news feed.

Doctor In Distress: a song put together by a bunch of B-list celebrities to protest the Doctor Who hiatus in the '80s. Almost painfully eightiestastic.

Latest Sarah Palin Speech Opens Sixth Seal. And lo, there was then a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair; and the moon became as blood; and "gosh" was spoken repeatedly.

An attendee of a Christian conference gives her perspective on the other event sharing their hotel - Katsucon. Witness her explanation of "Clamp mangas (comics drawn by all female illustrators)" and adult manga, "rated H (known as HENTEI)".

The Victorian version of Craigslist: vintage personal ads.

Linkspam on trauma and recovery, redux

2010-03-15T23:34:44Z

A User's Guide to PTSD, part four - a belated follow-up to the three I linked last time I posted about trauma. (Maybe after I post this one, there will be even more?)

The silent treatment: treating a man whose PTSD kept him from speaking for over a year.

Narrative and Memory at War: an Iraq veteran struggles with the knowledge that not all who fight are reluctant and noble.

The value of therapy being available to kids, and the troubles that kids without support face.

How childbirth caused my PTSD: not the birth itself, but the obstetric violations that went along with it.

And, semi-related, to end on an optimistic note: A gutsy ten-year-old divorcée puts a spotlight on the situation of women in Yemen.

The continued saga of copyright strife

2010-03-02T02:11:46Z

NYT editorial on how current copyright law isn't good for Holmes, or the rest of us.

( The movie is a lot of fun, but Holmes himself — the master of the cerebral has been turned into a brawling action hero — could not be more irreverently served if he were already in the public domain. )

Some f!s fandom stats

2010-02-24T23:01:43Z

In the spirit of recognizing that worthwhile stuff does come out of fandomsecrets once in a while...

These community-polling-type threads came up during last month's f!s anon meme, and I thought the stats were worth preserving. (I know it would be easy to spread similar polls through metafandom, but f!s attracts a different demographic in the first place.)

*

(1) "First fandom you were ever invested in?" A couple of people mentioned several, or included qualifications, so here's the simple tally of everything that came up:

3 - Harry Potter
3 - Thundercats
2 - Star Trek
2 - Yu-Gi-Oh!
1 - Cats
1 - David Tennant
1 - Digimon
1 - Final Fantasy
1 - The Matrix
1 - Pirates of Dark Water
1 - Pokémon
1 - The Powerpuff Girls
1 - Ranma 1/2
1 - ReBoot
1 - Roswell
1 - Sailor Moon
1 - Star Wars
1 - The West Wing
1 - Wheel of Time
1 - The Wizard of Oz
1 - The X-Files
1 - Zoids

I would love to be able to correlate the fandoms with the current ages of the people who mentioned them. Especially since polls I've seen have suggested that I'm close to Average Fandom Age, and I'm familiar with the source material for almost every single one of these.

*

(2) "what age did everyone start reading fic? what about slash/porn/etc. if applicable?" A scramble of numbers; some people separated reading and writing, a majority mentioned RPF of some sort, only a few differentiated femslash. Going by when people said they started reading (and taking the smaller number if they gave two, e.g. "13" for "discovered slash at 13/14"), here's the breakdown for the categories most mentioned:

Average age people started reading...
Fic: 12.1
Slash: 14.1
Porn: 14.2
RPF: 15.9

Median age of same...
Fic: 11.5
Slash: 14
Porn: 14
RPF: 15.5

The next time someone tells me "but we're all adults here!", I'm pointing them back to this post.

(Note that "there are kids reading, but it is not my responsibility to look out for them" is a totally legitimate statement. It's only when people say "there are no kids reading in the first place" that I get twitchy.)

Linkspam on translation

2010-02-23T18:28:51Z

Review of L'Alchimiste des Ombres and its English translation, The Cardinal's Blades. With plenty of attention played to the nuances, especially the names.

On Translation, specifically the translation of manga, talking about the importance of voice and attention to detail. Colloquialisms! Expressions! Local cultural effect! ...All of which amateur translators tend to suck at.

A Thorn in Their Sides, a reaction to the previous link. Be sure to check out the comments for a deconstruction of the thought put into a single four-word phrase.

And, related, an interview with a translator of Japanese SF light novels.

What English Sounds Like To Foreigners - nonsense lyrics, written by an Italian singer, meant to sound like English. If you've ever tried to transcribe Logos Naki World, you'll get the idea.

Finally, Only Poems Can Translate Poems. Densely written, and gorgeous.

A meme I have been sitting on for months now

2010-02-19T22:00:05Z

The Internet proudly presents: The Find Sherlock Holmes game!

1) Go to Wikipedia.
2) Click Random Article (on the left navigation bar)
3) From there, only using links in articles, navigate yourself to Holmes's page
4) Post your path!

My path:
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracheal_branches_of_inferior_thyroid_artery
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray%27s_Anatomy
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England
5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_literature
6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_literature
7) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes

101 fiction kinks

2010-02-16T08:20:59Z

Apparently this meme isn't going to leave my head until I finish it. No matter how long it takes.

...and, wow, I wasn't expecting to finish it in one sitting. Apparently these are a lot easier to think up than I had realized.

( 5. Fic about the characters as kids, in which they aren't just miniature versions of their adult selves, but the groundwork for their adult personalities and dynamics is still visible. )

Quiz Dump #14

2010-02-11T21:57:17Z

My secret Mole-Identity is #122: Lady Henrietta Mudbreath, A Patron Of The Arts..
Take Which Mole-Man Are You? today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

Some personality tests this time around - Myers-Briggs (INTP) and Enneagram (type 5).

( Knowledge, understanding, and insight are thus highly valued by Fives, because their identity is built around 'having ideas' and being someone who has something unusual and insightful to say. )

In summary: "The world exists primarily to be understood." Which, come to think of it, could be the tagline for the existence of these quiz posts in the first place.

WTF, Superbowl.

2010-02-08T06:02:02Z

Another year of lackluster Super Bowl commercials, punctuated by a surprising number along the theme of Our Product Will Help You Reclaim Your Manliness From Those Emasculating Women. ("I will hold your lip balm...but I will drive the car I want to drive!")

By way of an antidote, therefore, have some text from Julia Serrano's Whipping Girl.

Hey, girls, did you hear the news? It's just been scientifically proven that barrettes are dangerous! So are bracelets and bric-a-brac. It's a fact. And don't be fooled by thick-necked macho men who pretend that "girl stuff" is boring or frivolous, because that's just an act. Because as soon as you ask that guy to hold your purse for a minute, he will start to squirm, as if your handbag were full of worms, as he holds it as far away from his rugged body as possible. Because "girl stuff" is made with the gender equivalent of Kryptonite!

...So here's the deal: If you want your boyfriend to treat you with respect, then tell him that you won't sleep with him until he starts putting barrettes in his hair. And I'm not talking about secret bedroom kinky shit. Make him wear them to work!

Chase the Ace

2010-02-05T20:53:19Z

Let's make a TARDIS wave throughout LJ DW.
When you see this entry, post a picture of the show to your own journal.

Will do. But first...

It's the middle of halfamoon, a fourteen-day multifandom marathon of Reccing Interesting Stuff About Female Characters. It tends towards the popular Western media fandoms, but you get all kinds of other esoteric series cropping up - not to mention, this year, a bunch of Buffy recs, which is something I've really been jonesing for lately (especially where femslash is involved).

Check it out! Join in! And pick up some nifty treats while you're there. For instance, someone did a picspam of Ace from Doctor Who, including these two little gems from the extended novels:

( Large but awesome pictures under the cut )

Gives me chills.

2010-02-02T18:51:38Z

Do go on.

2010-02-01T22:35:40Z

"Did men and women both feel interested in the female body, and even (though it sounded ridiculous) in almost the same way?"

No, no, C. S. Lewis, it doesn't sound ridiculous at all. Please, let your female protagonist continue her bicurious narration.

(From That Hideous Strength, which I am about a quarter of the way through, and which as of this point I can best summarize as "He's a space-traveling thinly-disguised stand-in for J.R.R. Tolkien. She's an apparently-bicurious disgruntled housewife who's just found out she's psychic. They fight Merlin!")

I've genderswapped a canon!male just to draw her in a man's suit. Where does that fit in?

2010-01-30T09:24:26Z

Hey, ~~flist~~ dwircle. Let me tell you a story.

When I was but a wee young thing, already a geek in general and newly head over heels in love with the dubbed Sailor Moon that used to run on Cartoon Network, I had the bright idea of looking it up on the Internet. This is, more or less, how I discovered fandom.

And, oh, my mind was blown. There were more sailors! And they were soldiers, not "scouts"! And some of them were lesbians! (That's a whole essay on its own.) And some of them looked so good in suits that you might mistake them for boys. And some of the characters - in a pattern that was to continue as the next couple of series got dubbed and released into American waters - were boys, only they had long hair and slender figures and flirted with men, and so the dubbers had changed them into girls...

Fast forward several years. I'm watching the opening of a show I've never seen, unable to understand the lyrics but intrigued by the graphics. A classical bishounen - long hair, pretty eyes, sharp features - flashes on the screen, absolutely furious. I think: "Huh. He's angry."

By the end of the episode, I have changed my mind about Sir Integra Hellsing's gender at least three times. But the plot has me hooked, and by the third episode Integra (definitely female, even though everyone addresses her as "Sir") has taken up the central place in my fannish sphere.

( More (and more, and more) under the cut... )

Technology marches on

2010-01-29T06:44:34Z

Best comment yet on Apple's new creation:

"The interesting thing is that you can use an iPad even if you have a Wii."

Mori-san at work

2010-01-21T21:36:04Z

A bit of background: Mori Kaoru is the artist behind Emma, and her latest series is Otoyome Gatari, taking place along the Silk Road in the 19th century.

Video of the long, incredibly detailed process of drawing the main character:

One, two, three, four, five, six

Chunks of the process are skipped over, and it's still incredibly long. The sheer amount of hand-drawn detail is amazing. (Not that this comes as a surprise to anyone who has looked at one of Mori's pages for, oh, thirty seconds. Still, it's different to see it in action.) And then we get to the hand-cut tones at the end.

Somehow Mori decided she wanted to create a whole series with outfits like this on almost every page. The woman must have a vendetta against free time, or something.

(Crossposted to anime_manga.)

Linkspam on trauma and recovery

2010-01-15T16:42:22Z

Reviews of well-done PTSD in fiction: one, two, three, four. Covers everything from Lord Peter Wimsey to Lord of the Rings to The West Wing.

A User's Guide to PTSD, one, two, three. This one's specifically geared towards writers, and also features recs at the end.

Conscientious objectors during WWII exposed the horrific state of mental institutions at the time.

Mental illness is heavily shaped by cultural context...or at least, it used to be. These days the versions understood in the US are spreading.

Columbia University has been courting veterans, and they're getting off to a good start.

Krazy Kat picspam

2010-01-09T00:35:58Z

Just finished one of my new Krazy & Ignatz collections (the collected Sundays, 1925-1926), and was overcome with the urge to picspam.

Even if you've never read the comic and have no idea what it's about...just stop for a minute and look at these panels. They're lush works of art all by themselves.

( 'Spanish' me foot - you sing in 'American' )

Also: icons! Free for the purloining.

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. .
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Quiz Dump #13

2010-01-08T02:12:13Z

My Time Lord Name is Essrisingriloklandusunk.
Take The Time Lord Name Generator today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

It's been three and a half years since I last posted one of these. Some of these quiz results have been waiting on my hard drive for even longer. Let's see if any of them are still accurate.

( 'You are...Lion Warning LOLcat!' )

Fffft.

2010-01-04T23:45:19Z

The fic I finally managed to hammer out a complete draft of...is ~3500 words.

The "notes + deleted scenes + other huge chunks of text that I wrote before realizing they were down the wrong path entirely" file...is ~5400 words.

Clearly this thing Did Not Want To Come Together.

(It's the 3quel to the Grey, And Oh So Soft 'verse, for those of you keeping score.)

It's like an itch just outside of my head.

2009-12-29T11:53:56Z

I've spent most of the past 24 hours Getting Stuff Done. By which I mean a bunch of tiny little nagging website updates that have been at the back of my mind for months, if not years. It's kind of disorienting.

Also disorienting is the fact that I don't feel like I've gotten much done at all. I'm thinking this may be because I haven't gotten any feedback on it. I knew the Internet was getting me used to instant gratification, but I didn't realize it was quite that bad.

I might be able to assuage it by posting some big impressive fic, but even if I had something finished, everyone's on vacation and unlikely to reply.

Ngh.

...Okay, enough of my floundering. Have a meme.

you know how sometimes people on your friends list post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think, "wait a minute? since when were they working there? since when were they dating him/her? since when!?" and then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? it happens to all of us sometimes.

please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. one-word-answers seldom help anyone out. (:

( Answers under the cut )

Instead of making a holiday post, I'm staying up late sorting bookmarks.

2009-12-24T09:08:55Z

Following a very persuasive recommendation, I've gone and got myself an account on diigo, which is kind of like the Dreamwidth to del.icio.us's LiveJournal: smaller, but a whole lot more functional.

If all goes well, you should be seeing a post on erinptah_feed sometime in the next 24 hours summarizing the bookmarks I have so far (mostly fic recs, multifandom), and similar autoposts every day after that.

( Technical blathering under the cut. )

Mmm, journaling.

2009-12-22T14:12:18Z

So I went through and copypasted...most of my entries from GJ, for a total of maybe 300. They're the ones with (helpfully enough) "[GJ]" appended to the beginning of their subject lines. (Just to explain why they look so lonely and commentless.)

All of which has led to a ton of new tags. I'm pretty sure nobody's going to bother browsing this entire backlog, but it might be worth glancing down the list for fandoms you like, or perusing the lol tag, or maybe the links on the copyright tag. And the general highlights of those three years are collected under the label hey this is kind neat.

...I used to do a lot more excited, detailed recaps of shows I had just seen. I wonder what happened to that.

Also, new layout! Lifted from andthatstheword, which will be officially moved to DW some time next week, once (a) I've made it home and done some other catching up, and (b) people currently swept up in the Christmas rush start trickling back onto the Internets.

[GJ]

2009-12-22T07:02:52Z

Today's news has a "companies losing money through technology" kind of theme.

Witness the article focusing on people with DVRs who fast forward through commercials - which is, as it turns out, far fewer of us than advertisers had feared.

Or the teacher in Russia who pirated software - for the kids. No penalty has been handed down, and Microsoft (who made the software in question) said it generally wasn't interested in prosecuting teachers, so backslaps all around, eh?

Video sharing is making news almost faster than the papers can print it; the day after an article featuring Viacom and Google, we get another about digital fingerprinting technology that actually works - and is putting pressure on YouTube. Google's "if it doesn't hurt you, let it go" versus the copyright holders' "if it doesn't help us, make it stop" is characterized as "the most fascinating game of digital chicken the media world has seen."

Finally, while we're talking about online impropriety: "Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace."

[GJ] Drabbles and terminology

2009-12-22T05:28:44Z

100 words=drabble.
500 words and under=flash fiction.
500-1000 words=short short.
1000-15000 words=short story.
At 17500, you've ventured into novella/novelette territory.
At 40000, congratulations, you have yourself a novel.

Background of the literary terminology in this excellent article. Never knew the definitions were so exact, but now that I do, I think it's very cool. (I love words. Love them so much.)

Incidentally, this means that my longest story, The Bobby Report (Colbert Report fanfiction, by which I mean fiction involving the characters on the show, not the people who play them) - weighing in at about 11,600 words in six parts plus an epilog - is, technically, a chaptered short story.

One more chapter the length of the last one, and it would've at least been out of normal "short story" territory, if not quite "novella" length yet.

I should try to write a novella.

I wonder how long the Sailor Neopets RPG will be when finished? Episode one weighs in at just under 3,000 words; episode two is about 2,500. Sixteen chapters of that and it's a novel-length tale.

That's pretty impressive.

Now if only I would finish typing the next chapter...

[GJ]

2009-12-22T04:16:57Z

Demashitaa! PowerPuff Girls Z is so freaking cute.

I've just finished the second episode. The plotting could've taken a few cues from the original series (which had a surprising amount of development when you take into account the backstory episodes). And the animators are kind of lazy. The buildings have this awkward, sketchy feel - a very cartoony air, as opposed to the usual anime idea where the backgrounds are more realistic than the characters. I don't mind that, but therere are also places on the character design and action where they just aren't trying. (Mojo Jojo has no arms in half of the scenes, just floating gloved hands.)

But they're not lazy at all when it comes to the characters, especially the girls. The girls are wonderfully rendered, and have the most adorable designs, and they're just amazing to watch.

Bubbles is my favorite of the new designs; she wears a Catholic-schoolgirl-esque uniform when not transformed, and she loves shopping for cute clothes (which leads to her adoration of the mahō shōjo uniform).

Blossom's personality has been shifted towards the typical Usagi/Sakura/Ichigo type, although she has elements of the typical heroine from parody mahō shōjo comics, which is kind of cool.

Buttercup has fangirls =D So far, she's the one I can see most easily as her original self, just grown up a bit.

My favorite part is seeing little things from the original show animefied. (In the closing credits, for instance, there's a shot of Bubbles, and she's holding Octy. So cute!)

I wish they'd done more of that; the original series could've been so cool if it were directly animefied, with all the hints of continuity properly arranged and connected and filled out. But I'm still looking forward to the rest.

AnimeSuki has the torrents =)